


Each Life Converges to some Centre

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Angst, Character Death, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Marriage, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 14:02:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7937461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jedediah Foster received a telegram.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Each Life Converges to some Centre

Mary had sewn all the mourning bands herself. When Jedediah had come to her with the telegram in his hand and told her his wife was dead, she had not known what else she could do that he would welcome and society allow. There was no one else to do it and as Head Nurse, she had taken on tasks that would not have been appropriate for a woman in any other sphere, so to cut the hastily dyed cotton, hem it, bind it to his coat’s sleeve, was only a step away from how it should have been done before the War. He had said very little, other than to offer up the cause, “A cancer,” and look at her with confusion in his dark eyes, as if he could not believe he had said the words, what they meant and that they could be true. 

There was not very much space for grief at Mansion House and he made his rounds just as always the following morning, but he was brief, abstracted when the boy was not in danger, and distant. He spent more time in his room and seemed to want only Henry Hopkins around him for weeks, mostly playing absently at chess and sipping coffee. She might have expected tumult and rage, but that was not evident, though neither was the needle’s sinister effect; Jedediah was so much subdued that Hale and Hastings could note it and gave him a wide berth. Captain McBurney met with him regularly for their administrative meetings but did not try to interfere or trade upon their short acquaintance otherwise. She strove to remain nothing but the calm, competent Head Nurse when she was near him and would send Samuel Diggs, Henry, little Isaac Watts to interrupt or beset him a little when he seemed too much alone; she never went herself. Plum did, in her place, and she often spied the little stray sitting beside Jedediah’s boots, purring if the man seemed more silent than usual. She rewarded the calico with a full dish of milk every time she saw its kind attentions to Jedediah and Matron turned a blind eye, only puffed at her pipe meditatively, wreathed in her smoke like the Delphic Pythia of Alexandria.

Mary began to worry less after the night Jedediah put his hand over hers as she served him coffee; Henry was discreetly absorbed in a book on the sofa across from Jed, still an adequate chaperone. Jed only said, “A word, later?” but he looked at her with an apology in his eyes and something else, something eager she had not seen for weeks, so she had nodded and pretended she did not see Henry’s small smile that could not have been engendered by the Montaigne he was idly perusing. She had thought “later” would be the same evening, but an orderly rushed Jed from the officers’ dining room a quarter-hour after he’d spoken, the emergency a hemorrhage by the look of it, arterial scarlet all over the orderly’s smock, and she hadn’t been unduly troubled when Jed hadn’t spared her a second glance before he hurried out. Henry had said, “I shouldn’t tell tales or speak out of turn, but I think he’s better. You were good to wait for him” and then, a little cheekily, “I think you do know what I mean, Nurse Mary” when she had politely demurred. She couldn’t help smiling at what he said and the glimpse of the imp bright-eyed Henry Hopkins must have been at nine.

It was a few days before Jedediah found her in the small room she used as a clinic for the prostitutes; she disagreed with the general disapprobation the women faced but it meant that the room remained private and she had few visitors other than the women when they came on the afternoons she opened the door to them. When she shut it behind them, she would see a remarkable change from underneath the paint on their cheeks—fatigue, relief, the grimace anyone would make at wet boots that pinched. There was not much to the room other than high ceilings and a well-designed, trig squareness; she had filled it with a few chairs, a table with a lamp not good enough for the wards or the officer’s rooms, and it was so bare of ornamentation that Mary had spent a few evenings embroidering a salvaged piece of worn petticoat to serve as a sampler for the wall. Isaac had helped her frame it with pieces of wood he’d cadged from the Greens’s factory. She had chosen the text from Shakespeare, instead of the Bible as she knew she ought, but she thought the women would appreciate more seeing “We know what we are, but not what we may be” than any other Testamental dire exhortation. She’d stitched with the brightest thread she had brought with her in a little housewife and she would have made the border of pansies but she hadn’t enough violet silk. She didn’t think Jedediah would pay any mind to the room itself but she had underestimated the return of his acuity when he gestured at it and said, 

“That is no one’s work but yours, Mary.”

It felt so much as it had before, the repartee between them always quick, the sharpness undercut by admiration, and so she retorted, 

“I think Will Shakespeare had a little to do with it, Jedediah,” before she caught herself. 

She started to say something—apologetic and conventionally anodyne, to bring them back to the solemn mood they’d shared for so many days, weeks now, time that seemed endless to her, but might still not be enough for him. When he had seen it in her face, he waved his hand a little, a relaxed dismissal.

“It’s fine, Mary. Truly. I don’t need handling with kid gloves,” he said, but with a rueful smile she had nearly forgotten in him. “I know…I know the care you have been taking and I thank you for it, but it’s unnecessary now. Would you… may I speak with you frankly?”

“Yes, of course you may,” she said.

“I have been avoiding you, you must have noticed,” he began. She hadn’t expected it, for him to start there, to address what was between them so directly. She nodded, just a little, enough for Jedediah to go on.

“I—when I read the telegram, I thought, it was so clear within my mind, that now I was free… and I didn’t know how to live with that. I never wished Eliza ill, I, she was my wife and I was fond of her, if only that. I couldn’t bear that when I learned she’d died, my first thought was that-- how I would benefit, that I was free _of her_. That I would wish to be rid of her—I was disgusted with myself, but it didn’t make me miss her any more than I had when I thought of her far away in California and I could not wish, not for my own sake, that she would have lived. And I couldn’t, I didn’t want to come to you thinking that way, stuck in that half-grief Eliza didn’t deserve, being so unredeemably selfish.”

“It is always difficult to lose someone,” Mary offered. She would only say what was true, she promised herself, but it meant there were not words at the ready and she could not tell exactly what he wanted, from himself or from her.

“I have less experience with that than many, I believe. And I notice you haven’t said any of the generally consoling things people do,” he replied.

“Because they are not consoling, generally or otherwise, I’ve found. Indeed, sometimes they are the worst things to hear and I would not… I would not add to your distress,” Mary said. It was not the time to think about what had been said to her when she lost Gustav or the baby son who had never drawn breath, when her parents had died in the same bitter season, but she knew well enough that some words were worse than silence. 

“You are far too wise, Mary. But I am the better for it, for I couldn’t have stood to have heard platitudes or even heart-felt condolences over the loss of my wife—when I cannot say I ever loved her, not as I ought to have. I think she did not love me either, which halves the burden, but it has been hard to mourn for her. I had a letter from her father, so I know at least she was well cared for… and that there was nothing I could have done, not even if I’d brought her to Paris myself, nothing would have saved her. But I have struggled to reconcile my feelings, when I cannot fail to admit she bored me. Our marriage was one of those myriad small failures the world knows, acknowledges and dismisses as ordinary. It seemed we would suit, but we did not, and we never had a child to bind us in a shared affection. I think she would have been a good mother, Eliza,” he trailed off reflectively.

Mary tried to take in all that he said, explaining a little of the complexity of an unhappy marriage where no one was to blame—it was not uncommon. It was the War and the separation that were unusual, the distance that might be said to have killed the marriage well before his wife had died. Could they have reunited afterwards? They must have done and been even unhappier together she supposed, if there was so little between them, only civility worn down by the intimacy a marriage demanded, the beginning of an indifferent contempt. She could not commiserate with him; she had loved Gustav dearly and his death had cost her, nearly everything but her integrity, her grief as unlike Jedediah's as a peregrine falcon from a common sparrow. She had only lost-- her dearest friend and affectionate companion, that sympathetic, intelligent grey glance over the breakfast table, German poetry on cruelly cold Manchester nights, all gone when her husband died. There was a purity to the loss though and she could be honest about how she badly was hurt by it. She had not thought that it could be easier to lose than to gain by a death, but she saw that it was.

“So you have come to a… reconciliation, within yourself?” she asked.

“I have, yes. And I have your patience, your silent, constant regard, Henry’s miserable abilities in chess, Samuel Diggs’s Atlas shoulders and that little mosquito Isaac, with his questions and his curiosity and continual, considerable ‘favors,’ to account for it. All of you, so concerned for me, even if it was your fine hand, madam, behind it all—and I thought I mustn’t waste it. I don’t pretend to know what Eliza would want for me, I was married to her for eleven years and I can’t say I ever bothered to understand how she thought about much of anything, but she wasn’t a mean woman and she wasn’t greedy. And I am not a child, to be haunted by her,” he said. He stepped closer then and she saw the black cloth on his coat, cutting the sleeve in two; he saw her glance and stepped even closer so she had to lift her head to see his dark eyes, those long, dark lashes, the light in his gaze.

“I never thanked you for that and I should have—what a strange comfort, to have you be the one to make my mourning clothes. When I could not see you, I would run my fingers over those stiches, so even and finely placed, and I would think of you, Mary, sewing my clothes in your room, late at night with the lamplight on your face. I couldn’t see a way to you then, even though anyone would think it was the easiest thing in the world. You still found a way to me, the only way I could manage to accept, because you know me, better than I deserve. But I think, now I think I may come to you and tell you, how much, how very much I care for you. I am free-- for you to take, if you would, if I am not mistaken. Mary?” 

He held out his hand then and she thought, _What does he mean?_ She felt slow, stupid, blessed, beloved as she put her hand in his and felt his palm, warm against hers, and then his arms were around her, very lightly, an embrace she did not have to imagine. She laid her face against his shoulder and felt such a rush of contentment that she stumbled, but he only tightened his arms around her for a moment and said her name “Mary” very quietly, his breath soft on her temple. He drew back and she did not understand why.

“Mary, could I—may I kiss you?”

She nodded and felt herself flush; he smiled but said,

“I need you to tell me, your voice—I’ve been wrong before, I tried to make you…I never want to touch you without your leave, without hearing you first say ‘yes, yes Jedediah,’” he explained and she interrupted before he could say anything else.

“Yes, Jedediah.” It was her voice but when had she ever sounded like that?

In the moment when he looked at her, when he put his two hands on either side of her face and stroked her cheeks with his thumbs, she expected him to be hesitant, tentative—but she was wrong. He was not sudden but so sure, so confident, his warm mouth on hers, the silky roughness of his beard on her chin, her cheeks, while he kissed her, coaxing her and she was dazed with it, like the naïf she had once been and had thought she could never be again. She could hardly move, hardly breathe. He stopped and pulled back, let one hand drop and the other rest more delicately against her, cupping her jaw. His look was questioning, uncertain, and she knew he would be worrying about her before he spoke.

“Don’t you like it? Mary? Won’t you kiss me back?” 

He would wait for her or walk away from her if she told him to. She knew it and she wanted neither, she only wanted him, the man who struggled and wrestled with himself and who would tease if she liked or take her into his arms as long as she allowed it. She had not let herself envision this, all those nights when she had also thought _he’s free-- he’s free-- he’s free_ and had felt sick that she would think so, that she could long for him thus when he was grieving. But he was not free, he was hers now, and she might, must tell him.

“Yes, Jedediah,” this time, her voice a murmur, as she reached up her own hand to draw his head back to her.

She parted her lips as soon as she felt his mouth and he tasted her when she put her hand at the nape of his neck to pull him closer. Every small gesture of hunger she made, licking the corner of his mouth, angling her head to feel him better, deeper, incited him; he pulled her bottom lip into his mouth and nipped it, stroked the softness of her cheeks, the ridge of her palate, the line of her teeth with his tongue and all she wanted was more of him, arched her body towards him, broke the kiss only to seek him again and again. Within her mind, her thoughts had been distilled to _him_ and _Jedediah_ , _more_ and _love_ and _mine_. She felt her body in a way that was unknown to her, its animal appetites frantic, balancing her love that beat with her heart, the chambers coodinated to that one end. She was exquisitely aware of her skin beneath the layers of cloth, the heat of his, the longing she had to be touched by his hands, to have the male weight on him upon her. She laid her hand against his neck and pressed herself to him, her breasts, belly, her hips, all seeking him, and he made a sound in his throat, a low sound like a growl, and let his arms embrace her tightly, dropped a hand below her waist, cupped her bottom firmly through the yards of heavy wool and petticoat. She cried out softly and he moved to kiss her throat, his warm mouth hot on her pulse, tracing her until her reached her lace collar; his hand was back at her waist and then moved to touch the side of her breast, pushed up by her stays. She gasped and he laughed, an exultant, carnal laugh she hadn’t heard from him before and wanted to, so many times. 

“Lovely Molly,” he said, a mixture of urgency and affection and yes, wonder, “You’re beautiful, you feel so good, so sweet…I hadn’t let myself hope,” and then he was kissing her again, such gentle, loving kisses, and she thought if soul were breath, she would have given hers to him, heedless and deliberate at once. His intent tenderness excited her further and she stroked his mouth, his lips with her tongue, not only careful and sensitive, but insistent, desperate, a lust she was unfamiliar with commanding her just as emphatically as her devotion and love. What would it be like to be in a bed with him, entirely bare, his hands and mouth wherever she wanted, discovering delicious secrets she hadn’t known? And to have his dark eyes watching her all the time? To hear him ask “Please, let me now, Molly,” and to feel his cock deep within her the instant after she breathed “yes,” striving to please her and himself, his hand lifting her hip, his choked words in her ear, “love you, oh I do,” as he spent? _I might find out_ , the thought occurred to her, she would if she wanted, he would show her, and she could only cling to him, overwhelmed that it was not merely her solitary wish or lonesome dream. The chiming of the stately clock in the hall finally stopped her from urgently caressing him, making love to his mouth with her own as she had never done; it took until the ninth strike for her to perceive it and the eleventh before she could draw back enough to look at him, her hand on his arm, grazing the mourning band she’d made. He left one hand at her waist, steadying her, and brushed a finger across her lips. A subtle thrill ran through her at his touch, so gently possessing, and he said only “Oh, Molly” and then was quiet.

She had never seen him look this way before—he was not just happy, he was overjoyed and gleeful and adoring, and what was she? She felt dizzy and glad. Desire still shook and shivered along her skin; she was charged with all of it. There was no precedent for this, for what she felt, which startled her. She could not stop herself from speaking,

“What is this?”

Jedediah grinned at her and then let his smile soften with fond regard, heat lingering in his eyes.

“This is how I love you. Body and soul,” he said and then chuckled, relaxed, amused with himself and just purely happy with her. She thought he had never looked so handsome, so appealing, that this was what her husband would look like. “I-- I sound like a sentimental fool, don’t I? Not like a forty-three year old Union officer, but I can’t find better words to tell you, Mary.”

“Molly. That’s what you called me when…is that the name you call me, to yourself?” she asked. 

She felt both bold and shy and she did not want to take her hand from his arm. She did not want him to move his hand from her waist, unless he chose to answer her without words. If he wanted to whisper to her with his hands in her loosened hair, her hairpins scattered on the floor like fallen petals…

“Yes. Is it all right?”

“Not quite. You see, I’d rather, I want you to call me Molly Foster,” she declared, unable to keep the uncertainty from her voice as she wished, which he must have heard, for he pulled her back to him. He did not kiss her mouth, but he grazed her temple with his lips, bent his head to speak to her.

“There is nothing I want more than that, except to call you my Molly, to ask you to come back to bed, sweet Molly, my dearest love-- to give you everything, my ring, my name, my heart. I love you, so very much, and I didn’t know I could care this much, this way…I didn’t know how glad I would be to belong to you.”

“Do you? Do you belong to me?” she asked. 

Mary was not sure why she needed him to tell her so many times but he didn’t seem to mind saying the words, touching her hand, reaching to brush back a curl from her face. He held her in his arms and she thought perhaps he liked the reassurance that she wished to hear him tell her again, that he was welcomed, loved, wanted. He did not seem to mind at all standing in a bare room without anything comfortable or charming; it might have been a palace to him or a hermit’s hut. She had never had a conversation like this before. Everything about her courtship and marriage to Gustav had been comparatively serene and regular whereas this was all upheaval and delight, urgency and remove, communion, seduction. She felt clear-headed in one moment and then completely transfixed by the feel of his lips, his surgeon’s hands skimming over her, discovering the shape of her through her bodice, sleeves tight to her wrists, his bewitching words almost whispered, his baritone low for the night, for her. She could confess to herself that she had prayed for this, a prayer she thought a disgrace and dishonor but that she couldn’t help, prayed to God for something like this but it exceeded any wild hope that a lonely midnight had witnessed.

“Oh, yes, Molly. I’d say I was yours now, but that implies I had ever been another’s—I can’t say that was ever true, not as it was for you, I think.” He paused then and she heard the smile in his voice, felt his cheek rise with it next to hers, “Shall you miss being a Baroness very much?”

“I shall not miss being a widow if I may be a wife.” 

She let them both hear what she had said and let it settle them both, a choice they could make now and her promise to him in one. She stroked her fingers through the dark curls at the nape of his neck and it did not feel daring, but completely right. She might touch him so now and then one day soon as she walked by him in their parlor, while he read a medical journal, as he bent to pull on his polished boots. He did not miss her wedding ring now and he would not notice it when it was warmed by her skin.

“And I think you are the only one to call me Baroness in months. I have answered only to Nurse Mary or ‘Phinney’ if Nurse Hastings is in a temper.” 

“Shall you miss being the Head Nurse then? I can’t see Miss Dix allowing you to continue if… when we marry,” he asked, having stepped back a little to watch her expression, satisfied with what he saw when he corrected himself. 

“I expect I must manage. I could not choose otherwise and I suppose, if I am bored keeping your house, I must find ways to occupy myself. There is always worthwhile work to be done if one is willing to do it. I can’t think Miss Jenkins will be as particular as Miss Dix about my offer of assistance—if you would permit me. I think you must, though, Jedediah, for you have not seen me bored and it is not very pretty,” Mary said, a little piquant but mostly candid. 

She intended to make him know from the start that he was first in importance to her, but that she would still be the Mary he loved at Mansion House; some changes were not possible, no matter what Will Shakespeare said.

“There I will disagree, for I can’t imagine you either bored or less than exceedingly, impressively, incontrovertibly pretty, but as to how you fill your hours when I am working, I defer to you. You see, I have learned a great deal since you arrived and threw yourself at me,” Jedediah replied. She made a face as she hadn’t since she was a little girl and he laughed aloud.

“Oh, Molly! Did you think we should ever have—such fun? I hope you’re not disappointed that my love-making hasn’t remained only ardent and earnest like a young man’s,” he said.

“I have fallen in love with a man who calls another nurse “Hoopskirt,” who makes the most execrable puns in German I have ever heard, and who takes the greatest, loudest pleasure in cutting down Dr. Hale for his least important mistakes…I hardly expected anything of you, but certainly not a steady diet of moonlight and roses,” she said neatly. She had thought she would please him with her jest, and she had, but as she finished, she saw his expression change, his dark eyes become a little darker.

“I hope to change that—that you should have every expectation of me and that I should never leave you wanting for anything,” he said, suddenly serious and, she thought, looking at his dear, grave face, very tired.

It was late and the evening had been a whirlwind, a beginning, a mutual discovery—but she also felt the pull of sleep and if she should not wake beside him yet, she knew that to wake with the realization that he loved her and meant to marry her would be an adequate consolation.

“I have what I want, all I want, now you have spoken. I have enough, Jedediah,” she said but her reassurance stoked him rather than soothing and he caught her up in his arms again. She couldn’t help her sigh; how good he felt, how eager he was to hold her! She was just as eager to be held and without a shadow between them any longer.

“I mean to give you more, Molly. So much more that you can’t imagine it, I mean to make you cry out my name and to know I will give you whatever you want,” he said and then kissed her again, the most entrancing love-making she’d ever experienced; it was such a far cry from Gustav’s mild, diffident touch which she had accepted, pleased that he would be made happy by her acquiescence, but nothing like what was happening now. 

She felt desire, fierce and languid, balancing the gentle affection she had for Jedediah, the secret, fearful yearning she had to give him a child, the pleasure of his mind and how he would challenge her. They were as close to equals as a man and woman might be and she knew he liked that in her, her belief that he should listen to her when she spoke as she must to him. And now, he must listen to her speak or they would spend the next day clumsy, heavy-eyed, a danger to the boys, a target for Miss Hastings’s scrutiny and seemingly infinite spite. Mary broke away from him, kissed his cheek above his beard, the corner of his mouth, brushed back the ruffled hair from his forehead.

“Jedediah, dearest, I want you to take me to bed, oh! I meant, to walk with me to my room. It’s late, we are too tired for anything more, I cannot even speak properly any longer. There will be tomorrow and there are more conversations to be had, letters to be written,” she said and yawned; she thought it was the yawn that convinced him and not what she said before, but he took her hand in his and said,

“‘Good morrow to our waking souls,’ then, Molly. I’ll make you my Molly Foster as soon as I’m able, so there won’t be many more nights when you must shut a bedroom door between us,” he said and she shut the door to the clinic behind them. 

Mary felt the tasks of the day ahead beginning to sort themselves out inside her mind, the letter she must write to Miss Dix, a more practical conversation with Jedediah about a wedding and a house to be rented in Alexandria, a plan to be devised for her clinic and a meeting with Miss Jenkins, but she tried to dismiss them, let herself focus on the feel of her arm tucked in his; this she remembered from her first marriage, walking out from church or home from a lecture in the cool spring nights, and to find it again, some similarity with how it had been before was both distracting and calming. She glanced at Jedediah and saw the mourning band dimly in the half-light of the night lanterns lining the hallway and thought she might be able to pray for Eliza Foster now without bitterness or guilt just as she did for Gustav and all her dead; the loss could acknowledged but was no longer such an grievous injury, the poison of it drained. She had not thought she was so fine a surgeon as that, as Jedediah could be, to help mend the wound with her patient stitches but it seemed she had been. She saved the thought to tell him as she would have a sweetmeat, would watch his face for the subtle pleasure it would give.

**Author's Note:**

> I finally did it-- I killed Eliza Foster. I tried to mix it up by making the cause of death cancer (I imagine stomach or pancreas, something with a short, fatal course). This is my take on the aftermath as well as a whole lot of romance. I sort of reverse-edited, adding to the initial scaffolding-- I am embracing how overwritten this one might be since I doubt we will get anything similar on Season 2. For those familiar, I am imagining Gustav von Olnhausen to look and behave very much like Christopher Foyle on Foyle's War.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson as usual.


End file.
